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Tip: Troubleshoot Group Policy from the Command Line with GPRESULT

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When you are trying to determine why policy is not being applied as expected, one of first things you should do is examine the Resultant Set of Policy (RSoP) for the user and computer experiencing problems with policy settings. Using the Gpresult command-line utility, you can view RSoP.

Gpresult provides details on the following:

  • Special settings applied for folder redirection, software installation, disk quota, IPSec, and scripts
  • The last time Group Policy was applied
  • The domain controller from which policy was applied and the security group memberships for the computer and user
  • The complete list of GPOs that were applied as well as the complete list of GPOs that were not applied because of filters

Gpresult has the following basic syntax:
gpresult /s ComputerName /user Domain\UserName

Here, ComputerName is the name of the computer that you want to log policy results for and Domain\UserName indicates the user that you want to log policy results for. For example, to view the RSoP for CorpPC85 and the user Tedg in the Cpandl domain, you would type the following command:
gpresult /s corppc85 /user cpandl\tedg

You can view more detailed output by using one of the two verbose options. The /v parameter turns on verbose output and results are displayed only for policy settings in effect. The /z parameter turns on verbose output with settings for policy settings in effect and all other GPOs that have the policy set. Because Gpresult output can be fairly long, you should create an HTML report using the /h parameter or an XML report using the /x parameter. Here are a couple examples using these parameters:
gpresult /s corppc85 /user cpandl\tedg /h gpreport.html
gpresult /s corppc85 /user cpandl\tedg /x gpreport.xml

From the Microsoft Press book Windows Server 2008 Administrator’s Pocket Consultant, Second Edition by William R. Stanek.

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